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I kept picturing myself alone in the canoe, swept into the rapid, out of control. I could see waves breaking into the boat, could feel the panicked strokes that had no effect. The boat dropping into the hole, then flipping over quick as a blink. The plunging, the getting held under, the being unable to breathe. “I just keep getting this feeling,” I said.
“We don’t have to run it. You and I can walk down to the bottom and meet them if you want,” Alex said.
“It’s not that,” I said. My dad would’ve given me the same option about portaging, although it likely would’ve come with a catch, like some cranky comment later in the day, or some glint of disappointment in his eyes that I wasn’t supposed to see. Upset was supposed to have been the grand finale of the trip, the hardest rapid we’d run together. And having survived it as a team, it was supposed to translate into something else—some deeper trust and closeness between us, or some confidence and wisdom and test-taking finesse that I was supposed to be able to use to dominate life in high school.
Sometimes I’m not sure what I would’ve said to my dad. It was different in a canoe than a raft. Sometimes when I think about it, I imagine that I probably would’ve said portage, or that I would’ve wanted to take the sneak route—options, as it turns out, that don’t work so well in real life.
Other times—most times now—I see that I would’ve said yes. Yes, because he would’ve taken the time to show me the line again, tracing it down through the wave train and past the hole, picking out our markers so we wouldn’t get lost once we were in it. He would’ve turned the big rapid into something doable, something orderly and reasonable. It was just a series of small maneuvers that would add up to something larger. That’s how you had to view it.
